Review of Interior. Leather Bar. (2013) by Alberto G — 01 Jun 2014

To get this "movie" made, it was said that THE 40 minutes cut out of a controversial 1980 Al Pacino film called "Cruising" in order for that film to avoid an X-rating would be "reimagined" and filmed here with Interior.

Leather Bar. being the end product consisting primarily of those 40 minutes of lost film. In order for people to watch this "movie", we were told the same thing and wondered how this experiment would be completed.

The entire project, though, appears to be hijacked by serious, thinking and contemplating artist James Franco who instead has given audiences a possibly 6 minutes of re-imagined footage that would actually fit into the story while the rest of the "movie" is him pontificating to the camera about societal norms being engrained into our minds and that we should ALL want to watch intimate sex between partners because he is pretending to be making a serious project.

The entire thing -- not a movie or film -- is ridiculously pretentious (and yes, graphic!) and Franco's star, Val Lauren (Sal) appears to agree with me through most of it and he is distraught and uncertain what the hell Franco thinks he's doing .

.. or thinks he NEEDS to do. Franco wants to play with boundaries and having some is not the evil he appears to believe. I'm sure he'll twist his indecent chats with minors from a few months ago into some societal burden an artist shouldn't have to endure.

My imagination of those scenes from Cruising is better than this. Franco's ego needs to come down a bit. None of his behind-the-camera projects have turned out particularly well -- he needs to return to acting full time as he isn't the all-around talent he believes himself to be.